The being
the Liberators knew as "Father Time" was not human, although none of the
Liberators were aware of that fact. He had done enough socialising with
them that they all bought into the story that he was really Larry Scott,
a newshound who wanted to make time work against the criminals as it had
once worked against his father. The reason that the Liberators, even the
telepaths, were fooled by this was that on one level "Father Time" really
believed he was Larry Scott.

"Father Time" was an Elder of the Universe,
one of that rare group of figures who were among the most powerful and
oldest in the universe. The race he'd come from was long-since extinct
and forgotten, having dwindled to senescence and then race-death only a
billion years after the birth of the universe. When "Father Time" was in
full possession of his faculties--a rare occurrence--he remembered everything
about his birth-race, including its name, but his memories were not fond
ones. They were the abcde,
a race of sentient amorphous beings of an extremely rare semi-liquid material
not found within six galaxies of the Milky Way. Their home planet had been
a harsh and unforgiving one full of climactic and geologic extremes, and
the abcde
had built their civilisation on the bottom of their world's chlorine seas.
The civilisation had been concerned with survival first and then economic
prosperity; attempts at artistic expression had been rare and seen as a
waste of time. "Father Time," who in those days had been known as fghij--xwvumb,
was a genetic freak; he was born with an imagination, a rarity in his race
and something seen as a major personaity flaw. And so fghij--xwvumb
was
a social outcast with nothing that the abcde
would consider career prospects.

fghij--xwvumb
would
have ended up a victim of the relentless tides of the chlorine seas or
the liquid manganese creatures that swam through it, or perhaps have been
caught in the maw of the tectonic plates that the abcde
used as their final resting place for
otherwise indestructible garbage, had his life progressed along the "normal"
lines for a abcde
social
outcast. But he stumbled upon a device whose origin is unclear but is thought
to have either been made by the legendary Founders or to have somehow survived
the destruction of the previous universe. The device merged itself with
the stuff of fghij--xwvumb
and
imbued him with high levels of cosmic energy and the ability to control
and manipulate chronal energy as well as the Fourth Dimension--Time--itself.

fghij--xwvumb
immediately
left his home planet, which was located in an out-of-the-way system in
an ordinary section of a small arm of a minor galaxy on the far edge of
the galactic cluster along the rim of the Null Places. fghij--xwvumb
began
travelling, first in his own galaxy and then, after a millennia, in other
galaxies.

For a long time fghij--xwvumb
enjoyed
himself and his new powers, playing the galactic tourist in a variety of
shapes, seeing the many (very many) sights and experiences that the galaxy
had to offer. But eventually that began to pall, as fghij--xwvumb
felt the weight of the years upon him, and he looked ahead, using his powers
to scan the entirety of the Fourth Dimension to see his own fate.

What he saw appalled him. He was just past
his first millennia of life, and his death was not fated to come until
just before the end of the universe itself. The prospect of so many long
years awaiting him, like an eternity made up of rainy Sunday afternoons
when there's nothing good on tv and you've nothing good to read, filled
him with an almost unbearable grey depression.

He considered sending himself through time,
arriving at the heat-death of the universe and so ending his own miserable
existence, but even after so many years of being other races fghij--xwvumb
could not escape the abcde's
cultural inhibitions against suicide. It was only after some years that
fghij--xwvumb
came upon the solution that saved his sanity and enabled him to enjoy the
rest of his existence.

What had come to bother him, regardless
of the form he'd taken on and the circumstances in which he placed himself,
was that he always knew that he was an all-powerful being with very little
chance of being killed or even seriously harmed. As the years had rolled
by he began to feel that he'd seen just about everything there was to see;
different races and cultures began to remind him of ones he'd seen centuries
ago. Finally nothing seemed new to him, and everything--everything--recalled
the past. To go through billennia more of that was unthinkable.

Unless, of course, he wasn't aware of his
future, and his real identity.

So Father Time, using his powers with enormous
precision, slowed down the zone of time around a certain part of his own
brain, the parts that were aware of his own final fate, and the details
of his past, and the limits of his own power. He set limits on how long
the time dilation would last, and when it would stop and begin, so that
if he were ever in mortal danger he would snap back to full knowledge,
but other than that, he'd only know that he was an alien travelling around
the universe, using his powers for his own benefit and enjoyment.

And ever since then he'd visited uncountable
alien races, always wearing their forms and enjoying a life or several
lives among them until he finally was bored with them and moved on. Whenever
he left a civilisation he always returned to his abcde
form
and catalogued his experiences, and then went in search of a new civilisation
and new lives to live.

He'd been on Earth for only one lifetime,
as "Larry Scott," and was enjoying it enormously. The death of his human
father had moved him deeply and impelled him to begin fighting against
human evils, evil being something depressingly common throughout the universe.
He'd been flattered to have been asked to join the Liberators, and enjoyed
his time with him--the fighting was so immediate and real that he sometimes
forgot who he was and thought he was in actual danger. Then, when Mephisto
had helped the Germans kidnap the Liberators and torture them, "Father
Time" had suffered along with them, his enormous powers neutralised by
the more-powerful-still spells of Mephisto. After he and the other Liberators
had been rescued and recovered, his failsafes kicked in and he became fghij--xwvumb
again. He decided to continue being "Father Time," but with much more awareness
of his true origin and powers than he usually possessed while wearing a
mortal's body.

And so he'd continued fighting alongside
the Liberators, enjoying himself immensely and using his powers only sparingly
(that would be cheating, after all). He hadn't bothered to use his powers
when he'd first arrived on the plain of the M'krann; the sensations were
so vivid, and the notion that one of these mortals could actually take
control of the Crystal was so remote, that he decided to simply enjoy the
experience. By the time Apocalypse seized the M'krann, it was too late.
Apocalypse was in Heaven, beyond even the reach of "Father Time," but the
creatures on the plain of the M'krann...they could be affected....

Notes

This interpretation of Father Time is based
on the events of Captain America #383.